1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to the world wide web, and more particularly, to a system and method for previewing hyperlinks with textual abstracts.
2. Discussion of Prior Art
With the world wide web steadily becoming a major communication and research medium, advertisers and others have searched for effective means for conveying information, including advertisements, to web users. Users may request and receive web pages/documents through their web browsers at their respective remote terminals. Web browsers have become fundamental to everyday computer usage. Navigating web documents over hyperlinks (which may contain textual addresses of a web page's location, access protocol, data type and name of the web documents) has become a routine part of web browsing. Users of web browsers often encounter hyperlinks with identical destinations while browsing clusters of web documents. Further, in the browsing process, users often backtrack to revisit previously viewed documents. Visiting a huge array of web documents through hyperlinks, users often do not remember which hyperlink lead to a particular web document that may have been of interest. Hence, users repeatedly traverse previously visited hyperlinks to remind themselves of the content of their destinations. This browsing strategy forces the user to plough through a multitude of irrelevant web pages to rediscover the ones that are of interest. This therefore, results in an ineffective way of browsing and may ultimately cause users to get lost in cyberspace. What is needed is a method to assist in the reviewing of hyperlinks during the browsing process.
The prior art in this area is characterized by a conventional browser such as Microsoft Windows Explorer® which provides for a view called “Thumbnail View” that shows a miniature representation of graphic files such as GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format), JPEGs (Joint Photographic Experts Group), and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) pages that reside on a local system in an Explorer Window. This view allows users to preview multiple web sites and multiple graphic formats, simultaneously without visiting the sites, or opening the files. However, the Microsoft® system fails to provide on-line previewing of the hyperlinks in the WWW pages, but rather only of web documents on the file system. Further the Microsoft® system is embedded into Windows Explorer® as compared to the present invention that is independent of any particular web browser and operating system.
The present invention overcomes the drawbacks of the prior art by providing a system and method which presents to the user, previews of previously visited hyperlinks through miniature graphical representations, thumbnail views of the destination pages or thumbnail views of all hyperlinks within a web page. The previews of the destinations of hyperlinks are given in a dynamic browsing environment. The layout, colors, and images of these previews provide visual cues to remind the user of the page's content. Hence, the system enables the user to view the contents of the page without actually having to visit the page. This system is independent of any web browser and operating system and is implemented through a proxy-server or client-side program. Finally, the system is configured to allow for the customization of content and selection of thumbnail views to display. These and other improvements are achieved by the detailed description that follows.